SKF AB, a Swedish multinational specializing in manufacturing bearings, seals, and lubrication systems, remastered enterprise architecture and business process management with SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio solutions. By minimizing friction in business process management, the company is in a strong position to navigate change and succeed in transformation.
“With SAP LeanIX, we’ve significantly improved transparency across our architecture—empowering stakeholders with intuitive dashboards and reports, driving better data quality, and making enterprise architecture truly self-service."
-Kalpesh Mirchandani, Enterprise Architect, SKF AB
SKF AB is global leader in bearing technology and industrial solutions, combining a century of engineering expertise with a trusted brand and strong customer relationships across sectors, including automotive, railways, heavy industries, and industrial distribution. Its bearings, seals, and lubrication solutions are a key component of everything from bicycles to automobile wheels and transmissions—and from conveyor belts, robotic arms, and precision tools to jet engines and landing gear.
Since it was founded in 1907, SKF has developed a presence in around 130 countries and has created an extensive distribution network with more than 17,000 distributors all over the world. The company’s strategy focuses on creating significant customer value in targeted markets by leveraging megatrends to drive growth and margin expansion.
With its products contributing to better everyday lives for people and companies around the world, SKF aims to drive ongoing innovation to serve fast-evolving needs. However, improving the digital experience as a new competitive imperative harmonizing people, process, and technologies demanded solutions that would provide a strategic fit and integrate different dimensions of the enterprise to infuse agility and transparency.
Kalpesh Mirchandani, enterprise architect at SKF AB, explains, “Enterprise architecture acts as a trusted advisor across the organization. Providing better solutions is key to our mission—not only to guide decision-making but also to engage stakeholders effectively at all levels. But our old solution had a steep learning curve and lacked intuitiveness, resulting in limited adoption and reduced outreach to architects only. Consequently, we were unable to share architecture content to different consumers within the organization.”
SKF decided that the time had come to adopt a self-service-oriented solution to access architectural insights that didn’t require deep technical expertise and would support decision-makers from various functions.
Mirchandani comments, “For transformation to succeed, especially architectural transformation, transparency is essential. We needed a solution that was easy to understand, easy to learn, and aligned with our strategic direction. As well as finding a tool that was intuitive, self-service, and a strategic fit for us, we wanted a solution that supports the business process management journey from end to end.”
This called for an integrated solution to cater to enterprise architecture as well as business process management and that also smoothly links to the company’s operational tool chains. SKF found the answer to its needs with SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions.
Because the company planned to fast-track the decommissioning of its legacy tools, SKF had a small window to implement the new solutions. Needing to proceed at pace, the company turned to SAP Services and Support offerings. The scope of work for business process management included setting up the SAP Signavio Process Modeler, SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub, and SAP Signavio Process Governance solutions. For architecture planning, it involved configuring SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management, SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance, and SAP LeanIX Architecture and Road Map Planning solutions. The project also included managing the migration of data from its legacy system and integrating SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX with other data repositories.
Mirchandani comments, “Expert guidance, deep product knowledge, and advisory support from SAP Services and Support proved invaluable. Beyond installing and configuring the tools, we worked together in partnership and were guided through best practices and lessons learned from other customers. The entire engagement was professional, structured, and highly organized.”
“We needed to exit our legacy systems quickly, so were working under tight deadlines. That meant we required fast, effective implementation and expert guidance. SAP Services and Support provided far more than technical support in terms of context and shared experiences. Our teams were highly engaged and communicated consistently throughout the four- to five-month project duration.”
-Kalpesh Mirchandani, Enterprise Architect, SKF AB
Since going live with the solutions, SAP Signavio has become indispensable to SKF—not just as a tool but for the overall impact on business process management. The organization is currently onboarding the finance operations team, which previously maintained finance processes using diagrams in fragmented systems that were updated manually and difficult to manage. With SAP Signavio transforming that approach, these processes are now being unified in a centralized, collaborative, and governed space.
Mirchandani says that another standout differentiator came in the form of predefined processes offered by SAP Signavio Value Accelerators that helped the team get up and running quickly. There have also been other unexpected benefits, as explained by Mirchandani: “SAP Signavio Process Intelligence enables us to generate Business Process Model Notation diagrams directly from system logs. That’s groundbreaking—we can now model processes based on real system behavior.”
SKF has also seen big changes in information transparency with SAP LeanIX solutions. No fewer than 1,500 business applications are now managed in SAP LeanIX and integrated to SAP Signavio for harmonized process modeling. The company can generate dashboards and reports that show various relationships—making it easier for different stakeholders to understand the architecture. This transparency is also driving data quality improvements. Mirchandani says that when people see missing data on a dashboard, it creates a natural pull to fix it. So, the tool itself is encouraging better data management.
"With SAP Signavio Process Insights and SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, we see a major opportunity to enhance how we document, design, and govern processes. This gives us the potential to unlock powerful performance insights and reveal hidden inefficiencies, like having an X-ray for our operations."
-Kalpesh Mirchandani, Enterprise Architect, SKF AB
As the company continues its rollout of SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions across its operations, SKF is keen to explore the potential of AI-based modeling as a natural next step. There’s also significant interest in using the quick model feature in SAP Signavio Process Manager to build meaningful models without technical expertise.
